Six Great Immigrants
Fr. James Thornton
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The New American, February 19, 1996
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Before the creation of the modern welfare state, immigrants who came to this country were for the most part attracted by America's reputation as a land of freedom and opportunity. Laws and customs that then prevailed required immigrants to carve out their individual destinies by their own labor, perseverance, intelligence, and determination. Few "safety nets" existed for immigrants before 1965, save those set up by private charitable organizations. Immigrating to America was seldom an easy thing, and those whom circumstances defeated -- those unable to "make a go of it" -- often returned to the lands of their birth. Seen as a whole, immigration before 1965, while not perfect, and bringing some degree of both fortune and misfortune in its wake, was a plus for this country. Let us consider a few prominent examples.
Immigrant Founder
Many people may be unaware that the great Alexander Hamilton was not born in North America, but on the island of Nevis in the West Indies, January 11, 1757. It was not until 1772, four years before America declared her independence, that he arrived in New York to complete his education, entering King's College (now Columbia University) in 1774. At the outbreak of the War for Independence, Hamilton organized an artillery company, was commissioned a captain, and distinguished himself for his bravery and efficiency. In 1777 he joined Washington's staff as a lieutenant colonel, and served the great American leader as private secretary and confidential aide. Later, Hamilton returned to field command, where he won laurels at Yorktown, commanding units that participated in the final attack on British positions.
Recognizing the inherently defective nature of the Articles of Confederation, Hamilton was one of three men responsible for The Federalist and a guiding spirit behind the adoption of the United States Constitution. He served as the nation's first Secretary of the Treasury and later as Inspector General of the United States Army, holding the rank of major general. He enjoyed the absolute confidence of George Washington and was lauded by many of his own countrymen. James Madison said of him that "he possessed intellectual powers of the first order, and the moral qualities of integrity and honor in a captivating degree...." Foreign dignitaries who met him or read his writings considered him one of the most farsighted and intelligent of the early American leaders. He died while still young, on July 12, 1804, from wounds received in a duel with Aaron Burr.
War Hero and Statesman
Carl Schurz was born in Liblar, near Cologne, Germany, March 2, 1829. Educated at the University of Bonn, he immigrated to the United States in 1852, settling initially in Watertown, Wisconsin. Taking up the study of law, he was admitted to the bar in Milwaukee in 1859 and during those years became active in the Republican Party. He campaigned for Lincoln in 1860 and, after Lincoln's election, served briefly as U.S. minister to Spain.
Schurz fought in the Union Army during the War Between the States, and saw action at Second Bull Run, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. By the end of the war he had attained the rank of major general.
Returning to political life, from 1869 to 1875 he served as U.S. senator from Missouri, and from 1877 to 1881 as U.S. Secretary of the Interior. In 1881 he moved to New York where he was editor of the New York Evening Post and an editorial writer for Harper's Weekly. Schurz is author of the two-volume Life of Henry Clay. He died in 1906.
World-Changing Inventor
Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, March 3, 1847. Educated at the universities of Edinburgh and London, he immigrated to Canada with his father in 1870, moving two years later to the United States, where he became professor of vocal physiology at Boston University. In 1876 he exhibited for the first time his most famous invention, an apparatus for transmitting the human voice electrically over wires -- the now-omnipresent telephone. It was clear from the start that this invention could quickly and dramatically touch every facet of human existence, and for the remainder of his life Bell worked on improving it. He went on to devise an instrument for transmitting sound on a beam of light, the first "wireless," and also developed an early phonographic device. He published numerous scholarly works, including the Mechanism of Speech, a study of the possibilities of human flight, and another on the alleviation of deafness. Bell died in 1922.
Gift From Russia
Our next example, Fr. George Florovsky, was an acknowledged scholar in such diverse fields as history, science, theology, philosophy, law, and literature. George H. Williams of Harvard University once wrote that Florovsky "personified the cultivated, well-educated Russian of the turn of the century." Indeed this is true, for Florovsky was fluent in at least nine languages, conversant in several more, and during his life wrote and published scholarly articles and books in Russian, English, Bulgarian, Czech, Serbian, German, and French.
Born in Odessa, Russia in 1893, Florovsky was closely associated, with the rest of his family, to the Russian Orthodox Church. Florovsky's father was rector of the Theological Academy and his mother was the daughter of a professor of Hebrew and Greek at the University of Odessa. So it was that after the Revolution the family members were regarded as hated representatives of the old order and forced to flee. Florovsky went to Prague, where he taught law, and then to Belgrade, Sofia, and Paris. He immigrated to the United States after the war where, at various times, he held professorships or associate professorships at Boston, Columbia, Harvard, and Princeton universities.
His assessment of communism, which he witnessed firsthand, is interesting and apocalyptic. A "Godless rebellion is rising with unprecedented sweep and power," he warned. Communism is a "seductive and poisonous ordeal," transforming the time in which we live into one of "open struggle and competition for men's souls," a time when neutrality is not possible.
Shortly before his death in 1979, Fr. Florovsky turned his attention to the publication of his massive Collected Works. The volumes, 14 of which have so far appeared, are entirely in English. After immigrating, he came to prefer English to the many other languages he knew and insisted that the whole collection appear in his adopted tongue.
Father of the H-Bomb
Edward Teller, the distinguished nuclear physicist, was born in Budapest, January 18, 1908. Initially educated in Hungary, he took advanced degrees at Karlsruhe, Munich, and Leipzig, Germany, earning a PhD in physical chemistry, after which he studied in Copenhagen.
He immigrated to the U.S. in 1935 and began teaching at George Washington University. During the Second Word War he joined the American nuclear research team at the University of Chicago. He moved on to Los Alamos in 1943 and was instrumental in the creation of America's first nuclear bomb.
After the war Teller devoted his time to helping his country become the first to possess the hydrogen bomb, a project that particularly galvanized him when it was discovered that several of his colleagues on the earlier A-bomb project had passed America's atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. In his estimation, that America be first with the H-bomb was a simple matter of national survival. For his exemplary work he is known as "the father of the H-bomb."
During government hearings into the subversive activities of his former superior, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Teller assisted government investigators, telling them in sworn testimony that he felt insecure having America's safety in Oppenheimer's hands. From 1954 to 1958 he served as associate director, and from 1958 to 1960 as director, of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, the chief thermonuclear weapons research institution in the United States.
Resolutely anti-communist throughout his entire life, he campaigned against the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviets and fought for maintaining America's incontestable military superiority. He was a major influence on the U.S. government favoring the creation of the space-based defense system against Soviet missiles, known as the Strategic Defense Initiative.
Exposing the Darkness
One of the greatest living poets of our time, Czeslaw Milosz was born in Lithuania, June 30, 1911. Though chiefly of Polish ancestry, Milosz was educated at the University of Vilnius, graduating in 1934. Before the Second World War he worked as a programmer with the Polish National Radio and remained in Poland during the war, suffering with the rest of his countrymen. After the occupation of his homeland by the Red Army and the establishment of a Soviet puppet government, Milosz was sent to Washington and Paris as cultural attaché at the embassies there. However, unlike many of the members of the Polish intelligentsia, he declined to join the Communist Party. He was, in fact, a fierce opponent of the regime imposed on Poland by the victors in World War II.
Milosz came to America in the early 1960s, where he became professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of California. His most celebrated work, The Captive Mind, is a poignant analysis of the communist ideological mindset and its ruthless methods, and a damning indictment of Soviet rule. That work won Milosz the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980.
Enormous Contributions
The generation of public policy on the basis of shopworn clichés does the nation a disservice, and can be hazardous. One such banality, as we know, is that "America is a democracy," which is precisely opposite the intention of the Founding Fathers to create a limited republic. Another is that we "are a nation of immigrants." We are not. In overwhelming numbers, Americans of this century, and of the previous two-and-a-half centuries, were born in this country. They did not immigrate to the U.S. We all have ancestors who were immigrants, it is true, but it is also true of every other country. All modern nations took form from the wanderings of peoples who came from other lands. England, for example, is made up of the descendants of Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, Normans, and others who came in successive waves from the Continent. Modern France is a blend of Celts, Romans, Greeks, Franks, Normans, and several other groups. America is no more and no less an "immigrant nation" than other nations; the difference is that we are younger. Yet while this is true, we nonetheless must readily agree that immigrants have made enormous contributions to our country.
The six men whose lives we have briefly explored here have enriched this country immeasurably through their contributions to literature, science, philosophy, and political life. Our selection, of course, is necessarily limited in size and scope. Although we obviously cannot mention everyone here by name, we discount the genuine contributions of no American, be he native-born or immigrant, famous or obscure. We know that countless others have also made their marks here, men and women who served their newfound country honestly and loyally the whole of their lives. These people, who number in the millions, asked for no handouts, but simply that they be allowed to enjoy the freedom unique to America and to make their adopted land even greater. Together they represent the best in our nation's immigrant tradition, what immigration has often been, what it must again become.
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